Efficient, Resilient, Gallium Nitride-Based Cubesat-Sized Power System (GaN LVPC)

Many flagship NASA Goddard missions adopt a similar power distribution architecture for avionics and electronics. Typically, these systems are independent units that receive power from the spacecraft bus, and provide EMI filtering and isolated power for distribution to other circuit-card assemblies across the system requiring lower voltages, commonly referred to as the low-voltage power converter (LVPC). The LVPC architecture is common across many spacecraft designs and highlighted in the NASA SWIFT, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), SmallSats, and in a series of cards developed from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. This commonly deployed power architecture is frequently referred to as a DC-DC “Brick” approach, because (1) they employ DC-DC converters, and because (2) they are considerably large components or big “bricks” on a printed circuit board (PCB) designs. For spaceflight, there are only a handful of vendors that provide these large components qualified for use in space. Not only are these DC-DC converters large, they are expensive and have low power-conversion efficiency. Traditionally, this approach has been manageable because larger missions had much broader requirements for size, weight, and cost. However, these designs are cumbersome for and instrument payloads.

The objective of this research is to develop a scalable architecture using Gallium Nitrite (GaN) High-Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) modules to construct highly reliable and highly efficient power systems. This architecture design will allow for both isolated and point-of-load converter modules to be designed independently of specific mission power requirements and support a wide range of use cases. These GaN power converters are advantageous for instrument electronics and can be used to develop new isolated, modular power switching services cards, but can also serve as drop in replacement design for heritage systems to improve efficiency.

Many CubeSat missions are severely cost-constrained, therefore will forgo the radiation-hardness assurance provided by the standard DC-DC brick approach and prioritize cost savings by using all commercial components. This design practice also affects miniaturized instrument payloads, especially when the instruments used in the CubeSat mission are repurposed for independent use as part of a rover or larger mission sub-experiment. This CubeSat approach can be challenging because power components can be susceptible to a variety of radiation effects including single-event latch-up / burnout that can render the power converter component inoperable, which then disables the entire system or experiment. An approach using GaN modules is advantageous because GaN HEMTs provide comparatively higher efficiencies with lower volumes, mass, and cost when compared to conventional Silicon MOSFETs found in rad-hard DC-DC converters. GaN HEMTs have a low on-resistance that provides higher efficiency power conversion at higher switching frequencies especially when compared to silicon transistors. Higher switching frequencies provide numerous benefits including a reduction in decoupling capacitor quantity, smaller more efficient inductor package sizes, and higher efficiency and power density. These features are critical to enable small, low-power instruments in applications such as lunar landers, SmallSat explorers, etc., where the power distribution must be as efficient as possible.

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